White House czar urged 'resistance' against U.S.

JERUSALEM – President Obama’s environmental adviser, Van Jones, was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged “resistance” against the U.S. government, WND has learned.

The rally was sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, which calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a communist dictatorship.

WND previously reported Jones, special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is an admitted black nationalist and radical communist.

In 2002, Jones was a keynote speaker at a rally at People’s Park in Berkeley, Calif., to mark the national launch of Not In Our Name, a Maoist, terrorist-supporting, anti-war group founded by Revolutionary Communist Party member C. Clark Kissinger. People’s Park was created during the radical political activism of the late 1960s.

Jones spoke alongside Jeff Paterson, the first active-duty soldier to refuse orders to be part of the U.S. attack force during the Persian Gulf War.

At an Oct. 6, 2002, rally, according to a Discover the Networks profile, two of the specially invited guest speakers were former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, who was accused of involvement with the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of illegally passing messages on behalf of her incarcerated client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman – the terrorist mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

At that event, according to the site, 350 people marched through the streets behind a flatbed truck decorated with a huge “Not in Our Name” banner and a drawing of a “monstrous-looking” Uncle Sam stabbing the globe with a dagger.

Jones was also a leader of a radical group, United for Peace and Justice, or UFPJ, of which his Ella Baker Human Rights Center was an associate. Not In My Name was an affiliate of UFPJ.

The White House did not return multiple WND requests the past few weeks seeking comment on how Jones was screened for his position and whether the White House knew of his admitted radical past.

Jones on 9/11: Blame U.S. ‘imperialism’

Last week, WND reported that one day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of “U.S. imperialism” around the world.

Jones was the founder and leader and of a radical group, the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The group, together with Jones’ Elle Baker Center for Human Rights, led a vigil Sept. 12, 2001, at Snow Park in Oakland, Calif.

STORM’s official manifesto, titled, “Reclaiming Revolution,” surfaced on the Internet.

A WND review of the 97-page treatise found a description of the 2001 vigil in Oakland. The event drew hundreds and articulated an “anti-imperialist” line, according to STORM’s own description.

The radical group’s manual boasted the 9/11 vigil was held to express solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans and to mourn the civilians killed in the terrorist attacks “as well as the victims of U.S. imperialism around the world.”

“We honored those who lost their lives in the attack and those who would surely lose their lives in subsequent U.S. attacks overseas,” STORM’s manifesto recalls.

Also, WND obtained a press release of Jones’ vigil, dated Sept. 11, 2001, and titled, “People Of Color Groups Gather to Stand In Solidarity With Arab Americans and to Mourn the East Coast Dead.”

“Anti-Arab hostility is already reaching a fever pitch as pundits and common people alike rush to judgment that an Arab group is responsible for this tragedy,” stated Jones in the release hours after the 9/11 attacks.

“We fear that an atmosphere is being created that will result in official and street violence against Arab men, women and children,” he said.

Last week, Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck drew attention to a section of STORM’s manual that describes Jones’ organization as having a “commitment to the fundamental ideas of Marxism-Leninism.”

“We agreed with Lenin’s analysis of the state and the party,” reads the manifesto. “And we found inspiration in the revolutionary strategies developed by Third World revolutionaries like Mao Zedong and Amilcar Cabral.”

Cabral is the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.

WND previously reported Jones named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the communist leader.

STORM’s newsletter boasted “we also saw our brand of Marxism as, in some ways, a reclamation.”

STORM worked with known communist leaders. It led the charge in black protests against various issues, including a local attempt to pass Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that sought to increase the penalties for violent crimes and require more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults.

Speaking to the East Bay Express, Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.

“I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.

“I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary,” he said.

Trevor Loudon, a researcher and opponent of communism who runs the New Zeal blog identified several Bay Area communists who worked with STORM, including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones’ Ella Baker Human Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and Martinez also attended a “Challenging White Supremacy” workshop together.

Martinez was a longtime Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, or CCDS, in the early 1990s, according to Loudon. Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former Weathermen radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering among its leaders.

Jones then moved on to environmentalism. He used his Ella Baker Center to advocate “inclusive” environmentalism and launch a Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, which led to the nation’s first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, Calif.

At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007, Jones announced the establishment of Green For All, which in 2008 held a national green conference in which most attendees were black. Jones also released a book, “The Green Collar Economy,” which debuted at No.12 on the New York Times’ bestseller list – the first environmental book written by an African American to make the list.

Jones, formerly a self-described “rowdy black nationalist,” boasted in a 2005 interview with the left-leaning East Bay Express that his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class “justice.”

Jones was president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit organization that advocates building a so-called inclusive green economy.

Until recently, Jones was a longtime member of the board of Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environmental and community leaders that claims on its website to be “working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs.”